“Microsoft Studios is looking for a highly experienced senior games developer to help build and lead the team for a new AAA title within an established and well-loved strategy game franchise. This role reports directly to the Director of Development / Head of Studio. Your primary responsibilities will be to recruit and lead the client-side engineering team, drive technical strategy for client development, manage the day-to-day engineering rhythm, and evaluate and recommend appropriate middleware and tools to accomplish our goals.”

And whilst it doesn’t name the AOE franchise – which hasn’t seen any new release since 2011’s Age of Empires Online – it seems like a good candidate. Can anyone seriously name another “well-loved” strategy franchise that Microsoft owns? Let us know if you’ve got a better guess in the comments.

Personally, I’d be thrilled if they revived the franchise – I’ve literally just spent the weekend playing AOE2’s HD re-release – I had to figure out how to run Windows Steam in WINE on MacOS to do it, but my desire for global conquest knew no bounds.